A coworker of mine wanted a custom stand for his knives (the five straight blades can be seen in the fifth picture). I was given the dimensions for the hutch that would hold this display and told that the hutch was cherry—but also that he wanted woods other than cherry. I used spalted maple for the majority of it, walnut for the shelves (for the folding knives) and bocote for the miter splines.

The biggest challenge for me was precision. I’m a big dude with fat fingers and didn’t inherit my grandpa’s finesse. I did what I could to use my mathematical, calculating side to make the machinery do the work. The shelves are held in by very small dadoed slots (about 1.5 kerf-widths). The tricky bit was the placement and creation of stands for the knives themselves. I ended up having to hand-shape the stands for the handles and then epoxied rare earth magnets to hold the blades. Since these are high dollar knives, I couldn’t risk holding the blades in any way that would impact the blade edge or mar the blade.

At one point, I even polled the audience for what angle I should set the middle piece at. My original plan was to follow the angle of the side pieces, but laying the middle down a few degrees made it look much better.

Finish is rattle-can clear shellac. With so many bits and pieces, it was really the only logical way to do it. I wanted to let the wood speak for itself but not overshadow the knives.